Dark Justice

by Sinclair, Rachel

  I had no idea if it was such a good idea to take this law office after all. I didn’t want an enormous, 6’3” distraction like this Declan guy was going to be. Yet, I liked everything else about the set-up - the location, the building, and the office itself were all perfect. The space was beautiful and modern, with clean white walls on the interior, and every office had a wall of windows. The office that I was going to take had hard-wood floors and high ceilings. I imagined decorating it with my furniture and my colorful throw rugs. I knew that I would make myself at home in this place.

  I wondered if this guy was attached romantically. If he was, that was going to be a definite plus. That would mean that I would have to stop myself from daydreaming about him.

  “Yeah,” I said, weakly. “That’s me. Carter Dixon. That’s my case. That’s my only case right now, although I’m quite sure that will change.”

  He nodded his head. “That’ll be good for you, starting out. You rock that case and people will be banging down your door.”

  “That’s the plan,” I said. “But I just got that case, so I have no idea if it’s winnable or not. The police have some pretty solid physical evidence against my client, but it’s up to me to find the holes in the story.”

  “Well, if OJ could walk free, anybody has a shot, huh?” he said with a grin. He put his coffee cup to his lips and I felt slightly weak in the knees.

  “Sure, sure,” I said. “You know, maybe I’ll find a too-small glove and that’ll be my saving grace.”

  He nodded his head. “Okay. Well, I have to get to court. I’ll be seeing you, Emerson.”

  He floated away to his office, on a cloud, as far as I was concerned.

  I looked down at Olivia, who was sitting at her desk in the lobby. She looked at me with evident amusement. “Don’t worry, your reaction is typical of women who meet Declan.”

  I tried to act innocent, but I knew that it was no use. “What reaction is that?”

  “The red face, the loss of words, the stammering. He just has a way of making women speechless around him. You’ll get used to him, though. He’s human just like anyone else. Although you might not know it. The guy went to Harvard, Oxford and Yale. Harvard undergrad, Oxford PhD and Yale Law school. He looks like that and wicked smart to boot. Where’s the justice in that, huh?”

  I looked over at Arabella, who had a look of mirth on her face. “She’s right. Your face is as red as a baboon’s butt,” she said. “And I know how red a baboon’s butt is. I go to the zoo all the time.”

  I put my hands to my cheeks, and found that they did feel warm. “Well, I’ll take it,” I said to Olivia. “When can I move in?”

  “Any time,” she said. “It’s yours. You just have to pay a deposit and the first and last month’s rent and you can move in anytime.”

  I took a deep breath, looking around the beautiful, modern office and I smiled. This was going to be perfect.

  I just hoped that Declan didn’t distract me too much.

  Chapter 17

  After I got the law office thing out of the way, it was time to go and see Chris Warford and find out why he did what he did. I hoped that he was at home, and Arabella explained that he most likely was.

  “It’s probably his job to hack into computers and spoof and phish and plant viruses and crap like that,” she said. “He can do that from anywhere. I know guys like him. Usually they work for other people who hire them to get passwords and bank account information and spy on people. This one dude, he worked for a bunch of large companies who hired him to spy on other companies to get their secrets and stuff.”

  I drove to the address that Arabella gave me, in Studio City. His block of houses was a typical block in this area of town - small A-frame homes, built around the 1920s, with pitched roofs and large palm trees lining the street. It was a solidly middle-class block, although I knew that these homes, as all homes in Los Angeles, sold for at least a half a million.

  As I approached the door, I wondered if he lived there alone or if he was living with his parents or roommates. I really had no clue, although I had to think that, if he was living alone, it was going to make my job much easier.

  I knocked on the door, and a dog barked. I heard some rustling around, which made me hopeful that Arabella was right - he was at home, and not working at some job. It was nice work if you can get it, I thought - have a job where you don’t have to brave the awful traffic, yet make enough money to buy a decent house in Studio City.

  In a matter of minutes, a young guy opened the door. Although he was probably in his mid-twenties, judging by the youthfulness of his round baby-face, he had a receding hairline and a beer belly. He had a dull look in his eyes, as if he had just woken up from a particularly fitful sleep. He was dressed in a white t-shirt and boxer shorts and he had a Bud Light in his hand.

  “What do you want?” he asked me.

  “Mr. Warford, I need to speak with you,” I said. “My name is Emerson Justice and I represent Carter Dixon. He’s my client. He’s been accused of murder and I believe that you might have some information that will be helpful to my case.”

  He just stared at me. “How did you find me?” he asked.

  “That isn’t important. What is important is that I know that you spoofed my client’s Reddit account and planted messages that ostensibly were coming from him. These messages were regarding the actress Addison Wentworth and they were messages about doing violence to her. Now, I can do this the easy way, and you can talk to me voluntarily, or we can do this the hard way, and I can get the police involved in your operation. I don’t want you to get into criminal trouble. I just want some information from you about why you targeted my client.”

  He rolled his eyes, but stepped back and started walking to the back of the house. Since he left the door open, however, I figured that he was inviting me in, in a manner of speaking.

  I walked through the house and followed him to the back. The girls were with me, and I felt just a little bit paranoid bringing them into this situation - a weird guy in his house. I hoped that we would all get through this in one piece.

  I approached the room where Chris was sitting at a desk that was filled with different computers. Laptops and desktops and tablets were all strewn around this office, along with what seemed like hundreds of Starbucks cups, Chinese takeout boxes, plates with stuck-on food and an entire pizza in its box. He picked up a slice and looked at me.

  “You want a slice?” he asked me.

  “I do!” Arabella said, raising her hand.

  “Me too!” Luna said.

  He motioned to the pizza. “Go ahead, be my guest. I can’t eat the whole pizza by myself. At least, I shouldn’t eat the whole pizza by myself.” He patted his round belly. “I really need to stop sitting here at these computers, just eating myself to death. But it’s my job. It’s what I do.”

  As Arabella and Luna helped themselves to the pizza, Chris cleared off a chair for me. “Sorry about that,” he said, as he lifted about five books off of the grey swivel chair. “I don’t usually have people over. I guess you can tell by my lack of a marvelous tan that I rarely get out in the sun. You’re probably the first person I’ve seen in weeks.” He gestured to the Starbucks cups and Chinese takeout boxes. “All this has been delivered through Postmates, so I guess I have seen people. Delivery people. But you’re the first person to actually be in this house in weeks.” At that, he burped and pounded his chest. “Excuse me.”

  I had to admit, I found that slightly sad. “I’m sorry to hear that you’re so isolated,” I said, trying to muster as much sympathy as I could. “Now, I need to ask you some questions.”

  He nodded his head and picked up a piece of pizza and bit into it. “Listen, I’ll admit it,” he said with his mouth full. “I spoofed that dude. I did. But I just wrote out what my client told me to write. It was a job that I did, like any other. I got nothing personal against your client. I don’t even know who he is. I only know that I got this assignment and I did wh
at I was told. That’s all I know.”

  I felt excited. I was getting somewhere. If I could just figure out who hired him, I would be well on my way to solving this entire riddle. “Who hired you for this?” I asked him.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Hell if I know. Listen, I get paid to not ask questions. Like just who is paying my salary. I got a phone call from a burner phone, I got the instructions on what I was supposed to do to Dixon, and then money appeared in my account. You can go ahead and try to track down the number that called me for this assignment, but it won’t do you much good, considering it was a burner phone. As for who put the money into my account, as I said, I don’t get paid to ask questions. Your guess is as good as mine on who’s behind all this cloak and dagger bullshit.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know who put the money into your account?” I asked him.

  “Just what I said. I gave my bank account person to the person on the other end of the burner phone, and that person deposited $50,000 dollars into my account. It was as simple as that.”

  “Are you the habit of giving a random person your bank account number?” That made little sense to me.

  “Lady, if a person is hiring me for a job, he’s not going to be stealing from me. Not if he actually wants me to do the job. As for the possibility that the crook who hired me will steal me blind after the job is done, that’s a no-go, too. Every new client deposits money into a different account that I open up just for that job. As soon as the money comes in, I transfer it into my top-secret bank account that I actually use. So you might say that I have burner accounts, kinda like a burner phone.”

  “So there’s no way that you would be able to tell who hired you for this job?”

  He shook his head. “No, there’s no way I can tell. It’s strictly anonymous, even to me. Not every job I do is this much cloak and dagger, only the most sensitive ones. I charge premium dollars on jobs like this, because I get them done right, and I don’t ask questions. It’s very valuable for a client to have somebody who’s as discreet as me, and not everybody will go into a job for an anonymous client. That’s why I can charge big bucks for things like this.”

  I felt frustrated. I realized that I was not going to be getting anywhere with this guy. However, I did know one thing – what happened with my client was definitely a set-up. An elaborate set up. One with many moving parts, with this guy being just one of the moving parts. So seeing this guy was a definite plus for me, even if there was no way that he could possibly tell me what I really needed to know - who hired him. If I could just figure that out, then I would be well on my way to figure it out who did this.

  I stood up and gave him my business card. “Thanks for your time. Here’s my card, in case you need it for something.”

  He leaned back in his chair, putting his hands behind his head and then stretched his arms. He patted his round belly, and then shook his head. “Thanks for the card, but I don’t know what I can possibly do for you. I’m not lying when I tell you that I have no clue about who hired me for this job.”

  “So you say. Anyhow, if you come up with any kind of information about who hired you for this job, please call me ASAP.”

  At that, I left with the girls in tow.

  We got out into the street, and Arabella turned to me. “That dude was lying. He knows more than what he was telling you.”

  “I have a feeling that you’re right. I have him in my back pocket, and I can shake him down if I need to. In the meantime, I’m just going to have to proceed without him.”

  I knew that I could probably shake this guy down, if I had to. I could threaten him with legal action. After all, he did admit to the fact that his business is quite illegal. At the same time, I had no idea if there was anything that I could say or do to this guy to get him to talk about who hired him. I was definitely going to have to see if I could subpoena his records from the day he was hired for the job. It was going to be tricky, as he wasn’t a party to the case and he probably wasn’t going to be. The only thing that I could do would be to try to find out what the account number was for this so-called burner account, but even if I found that out, I really didn’t know what it would tell me. Unfortunately, if some random person just walked into a bank and made a deposit, there would be no way that I could find out who the person was.

  “So, where are we going now?” Arabella asked me.

  I really didn’t know exactly where I was going to go from there. I knew what I had to do, but it was nothing I could really do with the girls in tow. One of the things I had to do was to visit Carter at his home. Another thing I had to do was to contact some of the media sources who had been trying to get touch with me. I was going to have to give them some kind of statement, because they were calling me, texting me, and emailing me relentlessly. Everybody wanted a piece of this case.

  Another thing that I was going to have to do would be to get in touch with the prosecutor, so that we could arrange for discovery to be exchanged between the two of us. I didn’t know what the prosecutor had, except for the fact that my client’s Reddit account had been ostensibly posting violent messages about Addison, and the fact that my client’s hair was found at the scene. And, perhaps the weirdest aspect of this case, was the fact that my client’s Go Fund Me account was started with a $5 million donation from an anonymous LLC. That was very strange to me – I knew that this was a high profile case, therefore he attracted a lot of attention, but why would somebody put that kind of money into his account? That was a lot of scratch.

  I turned to Arabella, thinking that maybe she could help me try to track down the source of the Go Fund Me money, but then I thought that probably the fewer illegal things I asked her to do, the better. What kind of parent was I when I would encourage my 14-year-old charge to hack into accounts? As much as I needed information, there was not only a sense of morality pinging me about it, but also the fear that Arabella would get caught and go into the system. All because I wasn’t being diligent enough with her.

  But, then again, wasn’t it really harmless for Arabella to find the anonymous source of the Go Fund Me money? I knew that the organizer was going to see the name of the person who donated the money, but I also knew that there was a way of using a fictitious name, or using a confederate to donate the money. With everything so cloak and dagger in this case, I decided that whoever organized the Go Fund Me was probably somebody who wasn’t associated with the person who really wanted to give him the money. There were just too many ways for people to cover their tracks, and I was going to have to try to find a way around all of them.

  But that was a good place to start – find out all I could about the organizer of the Go Fund Me campaign and see if I could trace it back to somebody, anybody. Since it was opened up by an LLC, it was just going to be a matter of finding out who was behind the corporation, which wasn’t going to necessarily be an easy thing. If I tracked down who formed the LLC, through the power of subpoena, it might not tell me exactly who it was who truly wanted to give the money to my client. There would be just too many ways for an individual to hire someone else to sign the necessary contracts, make the necessary deposits, so on and so forth on behalf of the LLC, while the actual person who funded all of it would still be behind the scenes. It would be a matter of getting whomever was behind the LLC to talk about their beneficiary, and I was going to have to show good cause to a court to demonstrate why it would be that I would need this information.

  I turned to Arabella. “I’m going to need to get information on the person who opened up the Go Fund Me account for my client. There’s going to have to be some common name attached to it. That’s where I’m going to go next in this case.”

  Arabella looked bored. “I thought that there would be some kind of exciting chase or something like that,” she said. “You know, like in the movies. Lawyers on a big case, somebody wants to shut them down, they come after them. So far, it looks like your job is pretty boring.”

  “Welcome to my world.�
�

  Chapter 18

  I went home with the girls after talking to Chris Warford, because I wanted to get on my computer and do some research on Carter’s Go Fund Me. I discovered that the organizer of the campaign was an individual whose name was Holly Johnson. A little bit of research, and I was able to get her address and her email address.

  I shot her an email, explained who I was, and why I needed to talk with her. She replied within a matter of minutes. With her reply, I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy to get the information that I needed from her.

  “I don’t have any information for you that would be relevant,” her email said to me.

  “I believe that you do,” I wrote back. “I need to know the name of the individual who is ultimately behind Carter Dixon’s Go Fund Me. I can assume that you didn’t provide the initial $5 million for the campaign. That would be too simple. I understand that the person who made the donation wants to be anonymous, however you know who they are. I’m going to do what I need to to find out that information, even if I have to subpoena you. Now, you can do this the easy way or the hard way, with or without a subpoena. But I am going to get the information from you.”

  A few minutes later, a new email popped up. “I don’t think you understand. The person who gave me the money to open up the account, it’s a confederate and I don’t know who is behind it. It’s an LLC that is anonymous even to me. The registered agent for the LLC is a man by the name of Devon McDaniel. I am familiar with Mr. McDaniel, and I know the kind of business that he runs. He fronts for people of means who can afford to pay him top dollar to open up LLCs while remaining anonymous, and Mr. McDaniel is paid very well to not ask any questions. You can go ahead and subpoena him, but I guarantee you that you will never get a straight answer from him as to who gave him the money and who hired him to form the LLC. I can also guarantee you that there will not be a paper trail from Mr. McDaniel to his beneficiary. He’s too good for that. So, go ahead and try to do what you need to do to get answers from him, and please leave me out of it. I only organized this campaign with the initial donation. I have no idea who was ultimately on the other end of it.”